As the Lights Dim to Nothing

A dream in passing. A little world folded down. Boxed. Shipped. Like a Lego scene built and deconstructed and built again. Only this time smaller, growing up strangely amidst my own home, two worlds superimposed, one over the other. I keep thinking of origami - a page folded into a large paper crane, and then folded into a box, and when unfolded and there again is the crane... only not quite. A little smaller, a little more wrinkled. A dove, perhaps, with grimy wings.

And in that space where once a world flourished (a book world) there is an echo. The room seems larger and all the more paltry for that largeness. The carpet, unadorned by shelves, looks more frayed, shabbier, a suddenly bereft parent after the children have left. Why keep up appearances any longer?

It looks a little dirty. The walls, so long covered, are really quite ugly. The light through the windows seems a little flat, uninteresting, or perhaps merely uninterested. Colour has been stripped away, and the dazzle of light lives only in reflection, in the deflected vividness of blues and greens and reds and the deep deep browns of wooden shelves. Bits of tape on the window, where SALE! signs have been stripped hastily away. A few screws on the ground, here and there, bits of powdered drywall clinging to the threads. A little forlorn... they hold nothing now, and all is air and space and ceaseless echo.

The front step, broken and repaired by The City of Windsor, is broken again. It took a day. Craftsmanship like this is lauded only in the Land of Broken Things, where everything costs a dollar. An empty rectangle. I have boxed up the memories, too, and carted them away. Already the rectangle has forgotten everything, everything but a few words, the tattered corners of pages that have torn away (the books having already emmmigrated) and now flutter in the breeze from the door. Collect them all together and perhaps there's a meaning... a puzzle to be deciphered. A mouse, perhaps, late at night, will discover the wisdom, will hoard it away with cheese and lint and dabs of butter stolen from local restaurants.

And beyond that door, beyond that breeze, there is a new world, or a world made new by opportunity and necessity. Only a moment to look back at the sign, white lettering on black background. The font is Book Antiqua. of course. And the sign... a name. A name chosen for a beginning, for a mother who started me reading with the literary gift of an Oxford Professor, for one beginning that led to another, to an inkling of an idea, an idea of a place filled with books.

Inklings Bookshop.

I'll leave it there, the sign, a last memory for the street to cling to even as the lettering fades. It was, too briefly, a symbol, an arrow, a guide. But time will wash over it, surely. It will fade to the relevance of graffiti, detritus cast up by the old paved sea of Windsor. Until someone paints over it, hangs out a new shingle bright with hope.

Inklings Bookshop.

An arrow that now points only to a place inside my head, adorned with sights and smells and rich with the texture of pages. A place where the shelves are endless and stretch on through the slanted light. Motes of dust in the air, aglow in that light and floating, floating, floating...

The Anecdotal Life of a Bookshop: The Moat

Yes, I have a moat in front of my shop. No lie. I thought I would move to a more medieval look, and this would be better for scaring intruding customers away.

And it was free! The city did it for absolutely nothing.

I came in today, excited, as it's sort of an important day: the first day of my big two month closing sale. The day I advertized for with that cold hard cash that had to be pried from my tight, tight fingers. And I arrive to find... no sidewalk. The city chose this day of all days to tear it up. And when I mean tear, I really mean tear. Tearing to the measure of a trench three feet wide and three feet deep. A wonderful moat. Apparently customers will really have to earn their book sale. By hurdling a moat. Plus the dodging of jackhammers, plows and steam shovels. I'm only awaiting Indiana Jones to swing in on his whip. I may have to rig up the flaming arrows myself. If I want the proper atmosphere, that is. And, you know, atmosphere is everything. There's no joie de vivre without flaming arrows.

And they broke my step. Tiles are all busted. But, hey, luckily the step won't be mine for much longer. Ha! Do your worst, City of Windsor. If you cross my moat I shall smite thee with a copy of The Canterbury Tales. Annotated. Hardcover. You haven't been smited until you've been smited with one of those. The gold leaf adds an extra little flair to the smiting.

Oh, and the workers cut a gas line, too. If they really work on it I think they can get the whole downtown core to subside into the Detroit River. I'm putting it at 50-50 right now. The Union Gas guy came to check my furnace and pilot light. Apparently I'm not going to burn up or asphyxiate. Which is good to know. I'd hate to be robbed of the chance to see the bottom of the Detroit River from the comfy confines of a bookshop.

The Anecdotal Life of a Bookshop: Rain, Rain...

The faded, grey light of a rainy day offers soft illumination. A little hazy. The rain comes down. The rain stops. Droplets fall from fences, from rain-darkened branches. Drip, and drip, and drip.

The streets are quiet, becalmed. Huddled might be the word, if a street can huddle. Even after the rain stops the street is quiet, as if people do not yet trust the sky. No, no, the sun has been proven false too many times with its claims and promises.

An open door, a breeze. The coolness of wet-washed air.

A bird flies in. What did it sense, or want? A dry place, a bit of food? Has the shop been mistaken for an oddly shaped tree, a dusty and geometric nest?

It's small. A white belly, mottled brown wings. It panics. Walls and books (the rectangular ghosts of trees) seem strange to it, fearful. It hits a light, flies around. I can hear its wings in the silence. When else do you hear the wings of birds? Outside the sound is lost, dispersed to the sky, to the grass and trees. But here in the silence of a bookshop on a rainy day I hear the flap of wings.

The bird mistakes windows for sky, banging into them. Frustrated and confused, and now probably hurting (though the pain must be subsumed beneath the fear), the bird batters the glass, railing against the sense of a grand cage closing around it.

The bird flutters around the base of the window, as if expecting the transparent wall to vanish. Its mouth is open... perhaps it gasps for breath.

I have to herd the small bird, and without hurting it. I scare it, of course, but that can't be helped. From below, looking up, help and opportunity are like the tip of a giant umbrella poking and prodding one along.

Finally the bird is by the door. A final prod and it flies out into the damp air. Perhaps it dodges the drops of water, the drip and drip and drip, or perhaps not. Perhaps the touch of free water is to be embraced.

It is good, of course, to have at least one customer, fragile though they may be.



Post script: Picture, By Request... (a little blurry, I admit)

The Anecdotal Life of a Bookshop: Opening

There is something special about opening the door to my shop in the morning. Perhaps it's merely the morningness of it, the optimism of a new day and the opportunities it might bring. And yet there is something more, I think, the fleeting touch of something profound, or if not profound at least precious.

There is a perfection in that first moment, a sense of time unruined. There is a soft, shadowy gloom to the shop before I turn on the lights. Just the sense of a door opening out into space, into the soft gloom, and the long rows of bookcases receding back into deeper shadows. And on each shelf of each case there is a row of books, spines out. In the light that has yet to come the covers will show their colours, like neon leaves in the autumn, strutting their eye-catching graphic designs. But in the gloom there is just a shape, forms limned in various shifting greys, shadows and ghosts and mere suggestions of hidden truths.

The bookcases are dark wood, a rich colour even in the gloom. I know them well; I built them myself. Cut, nailed, stained and sealed. Real wood, organic, still a little alive. They seem expectant in the gloom, waiting, and yet always patient.

Morning light slants in the front windows, but it's pale yet, as the windows face west. The light is soft and seems to highlight the shadows more than dispel them. A soft glow hovers at the front of the shop and does not penetrate further back. My photographs hang, framed, above the shelves. Scenes from my travels, shots of buildings from odd angles, and rivers, waterfalls, trees. Maybe the shelves like these pictures, too, remembering a former life, a life of branches and leaves and digging roots. Life's a little drier now, perhaps, but they still get to hold a rich yield of fruit, though of a very papery kind.

I like that moment, standing in the just opened door, that sense of unfolding space, my gaze trailing down the aisles, the rows slipping away. The smell of wood, of paper, of dust, the smell of books. Peace... a sense of hallowed space. A personal space, a place sacred to just one person, and sacred only for a moment. For just that moment I feel a touch of something... perhaps it is something as simple as joy, or hope, or perhaps it is something more complex. Faith, perhaps, or some strange braiding of identity and geography, place becoming intertwined with self. A momentary hallowing, like hands cupped beneath cold water.

A bookshop. A door opening. A moment alone... a moment that is mine.

And what about you? What are your hallowed moments?

The Anecdotal Life of a Bookshop: In the Beginning

The last post got me thinking about that strange need, that strange want of book. I think all readers (and writers) have this: a want of book. A desire for books, a little cerebral itch. And, really, that's what having a bookstore was all about for me: a massive want of book. A neurosis, perhaps, a want of book grown beyond all bounds. And joyously so.

In particular that idea of the want of book started me thinking not just about the drive I had to open a bookstore, but the actual beginning of it, the first steps of acquisition. I needed books, and I had to find them... and purchase them. A book lover's dream, perhaps. Free rein to buy books...

I started travelling, hopping in my car and driving to book sales all across the province. Church sales, charity sales, store sales, library sales... A family trip to the zoo even detoured into a purchasing spree at a closing bookstore. Books!

It's a pilgrimage, of sorts. My trips grew longer. Into a new country, through the states of Michigan, Ohio and New York. Long drives with only the lure of books to draw me on. But in the end... a sale, a place full of books (and cheap books, at that), where I could grab and handle them, could smell and almost taste them. Filling one box, and then another, and another. I could look at each cover, brushing my hand across the pages. Each title, each writer. A little blessing for each and then into the greedy box. Long drives to get there. Six hours, eight hours, ten hours... yet the drives home were always longer. The book want temporarily satisfied, and missing my family... driving the highways, an endless slick of blacktop flowing beneath, passing out of mind and memory.

Yet always another sale. And if these trips were pilgrimages, Mecca was Ithaca, New York. In the spring and fall Ithaca holds a book sale, each time spread over three weekends. Each day of the sale the book prices drop. And they have, each time, up to 300,000 books for sale. A two day trip, a long long drive down, a cheap hotel, and then a sale to end all sales. A warehouse with endless shelves, shelves always seemingly refilled, inexhaustible, a basket of blessed bread and fish.

A long ride home, of course. But before that I stopped at a few parks. Ithaca is located in the beautiful Finger Lakes region of upstate New York, an area comprehensively checker-boarded by state parks. The most beautiful, perhaps, is Watkins Glen, where a river has carved down through the forest, down through the rock, carving out a steep canyon draped in a lush forest skin. The water peels and tumbles over stone, down waterfalls, winding and cutting ever lower, ever closer to a welcoming lake. Shadow and mist shape the way, colouring it in extremes. Paths wind along the water's edge, sometimes below the cliffs, sometimes above. The path ducks behind a waterfall, where my fingers feel the flood of white life falling down, ever eager to continue its journey. Light is dappled into bright slants through the leaves of overhanging trees.

Above, climbing through the forest, I stumble out into a graveyard. The sun touches it on this high hill overlooking the world, as if the dead want to see for miles and thus remember their own travels, their own lost movements. History rests in the stone markers. 1900s, 1800s, 1700s... stones worn and weathered, a little faded and yet holding true, their words lingering.

Yet the most amazing thing was that I was entirely alone. It was in the park's off season, a monday morning. And it was entirely empty. Just me. Not another car in the parking lot, not another person on the paths. I'd been here before, as a child, and I remembered the water and the gorge and the hot sun and the press of people, the families vacationing and wandering about, kids complaining, asking for drinks, for snacks, for ice cream. Yet now... I was alone. The park was mine, and in that moment existed only for me.

A connection remains, between the book pilgrimmage and the gorge. In my head the experiences are intertwined, resonant, mutually reflective. Connected by time and geography, yes... but also by a feeling, by a sense of something ineffable. The park that day held a sense of both solitude and communion, and I sometimes think that ambivalent feeling is the perfect metaphor for a book.

A book is its own world, self-contained and communicative... you share a world, and yet you share it in solitude. You commune, but inside the strictures of your own imagination. You have a whole world to explore, and yet you explore it alone, with only the memory to share. Yet there is, I think, in that solitude, something profound. In that solitude is a most perfect and willing moment of shared story, a communication that slips the bindings of time. It is a piece of life framed in pages.

And so what was a bookstore but a collection of these infinite little worlds? Shared pieces of life, so many of them, becoming a vast quilt, but one ever shifting and changing. A place where others could come and share too, partaking of those moments, those lives, those worlds. Slipping a little further through time, a little further into story.

Each trip was a pilgrimmage, and yet so is each book. A trip to solitude and communion.

The Anecdotal Life of a Bookshop: I Don't Want a Book (Apparently)

People are odd. And one of the ways people are odd is to be odd about books. And one of the oddest of such oddities occurs when a customer comes in to ask for a specific book. This happens a lot, and normally it's a simple and painless process. Someone asks for a book: I can say "Yes, I have it," or I can say "No, I don't have it," or I can say "Let me check."

Checking is better than saying "No." Checking draws the customer in, and if I don't have what they're looking for, well, they may find something else just as good. Get them looking at the shelves themselves, that's the key. See, salesmanship! Hard to believe, I know, but I've learned a few things. Not many, admittedly, but a few.

The interesting thing, though, occurs when I do have a book. Actually, most of the time it's not interesting, but simply profitable. And happy! "Yes, I do have that book! Here it is!" "Great! Here's my oodles of cash with which to feed your children! I'll bring more the next time I come through!" Everyone's happy, Amen, Hallelujah.

But sometimes people come in, eager and excited, a question on their lips: "I'm looking for Book X. Really, I've been looking for it everywhere. Do you have it?"

"Yes, I do! Come this way."

I present the book. It's shiny. It's exactly what they want. They came into the store for just this very thing. Eagerly, bouncily, happily... they are the Tiggers of the book world, and they are getting just what they want.

But... a moment of hesitation. They turn the book over... heft it a little, as if its weight were a key factor in the process of selection and purchase. And here is the strangeness... a moment of pause, a flattening of expression, a cessation of Tiggerish bounciness. What's going through their mind? Doubt of some sort, it seems. Was this really what they wanted? They consider. A pregnant moment, a moment of stillness, where the direction of movement is not yet decided and yet still imminent. Everything teeters, teeters so precariously...

They are wondering, perhaps, what the reasons were for wanting this book. They have it now, in their hands, and yet perhaps the reasons grow distant, escaping beyond the bounds of the want that drove them into the shop... and that want has now become a thin and paltry thing. So vague, so poorly understood... like a dream when one awakes, a dream that slips away even as they try to hold it. So insubstantial. In a moment it is only the fragment of an image, a lingering mood, a feeling, a few lonely words. This is all, seemingly, that's left of their want, the need that had driven them so keenly only moments before. A disparity, perhaps, between that bright want and the dim, bookish shape in their hands.

Perhaps they had loved the ideal, the platonic perfection of the image. It was made grand by want, by distance, by the very lack that drove the want in the first place. It was exciting because they did not have it, because of the possibly of it, the maybe of it. And perhaps the concrete existence can't match this mystery. A book. A title, a picture, pages and pages of words. Sentences, too. Paragraphs. Is this really what they wanted, a collection of paragraphs?

No, this could not be it. They didn't want this, not sentences, no. Certainly not paragraphs. And chapters? Out of the question. They shake their head a little. Hum and haw and become very aware of my presence. They asked for it but don't really want it, not really. They wanted the wanting. The thrill of the chase. Now there's only awkwardness; they asked for it and now they have it. What now? What to do? Should they really offer money for this thing? Money for words?

"Hmmm, maybe..." they say, but already their hand is inching back to the shelf. Slowly, though, as if not to spook the bookcase and scare it away. Don't startle, nice and easy, just put the book down slow and everything will be alright... Slow, yes. If they put it back slowly enough no one will notice they're putting it back. Even the shelf won't notice the extra weight. Just that Dostoyevsky, the shelf will think, putting on a little extre Christmas fat that'll be gone by spring.

The customer says something unrelated. Distraction. The magician's oldest trick: draw the eye away.

The book is re-shelved. They look around the shop, but their heart isn't in it. They've waylaid their Tiggerishness, they're all bounced out. If they didn't want what they wanted, how could they want what they didn't want? They continue to browse - distracting everyone (even themselves) from the memory of that one book, it's rejection and re-shelving, as if they had always come in just to browse.

They leave.

What they wanted was not enough. What I wanted (a sale) was not enough, either. Those two wants had circled each other, snarling, marking their territory. In the end that other want, the one that lived so ephemerally as a want and never became a need, had sidled up to me and peed on my foot.

The Anecdotal Life of a Bookshop: I Want a Book

Charming Proprietor: Hi there, how can I help you?

Customer: I want a book.

Charming Proprietor: Um... yes?

Customer: Well, you see... I can't remember the name of it.

Charming Proprietor: Maybe the name of the author?

Customer: I can't remember who wrote it, either. Or what it's about.

Charming Proprietor: ...?

Customer: But I know it has a blue cover. And it's about this big. (Customer holds up hands to indicate the size of the book, which appears to be, oddly, rather book-sized)

Charming Proprietor: ...?

Earnest Customer: Do you have that book? I really want it.

Charming Proprietor: As it so happens, I have 8,000 copies of that book. Come right this way. Will you be paying by cash or by card?

Why You Should All Write Short Books (And Why I'll Kill You If You Don't)

The pyramids are beautiful things, transcendent against the sky.

But the labour of them... think of yourself down there, under the scorch of the sun, hauling, hauling, hauling. Hauling what? A big piece of rock. Squared off and symmetrical, yes, but still a big rock. Heavy. Obdurate. So painfully unwilling. And your task is to haul this heathen rock to a pyramid and stack it wearily into a sacred object of grace. An almost divine transformation...

But on the ground, heaving the stones... the grace seems far away. There's just the heat, the sweat vaporizing off the skin, the faltering muscle and bone. The sand absorbs half of your strength, sucking energy from each step. Dust puffs around you, whitening the soon-to-be-holy stone. You have banged against the hard stone. You are bruised, bleeding. You push on against the wilful disregard of the stone.

Your breath grows haggard in your chest. Your joints hurt. Your fingers ache terribly, the pain running up to your elbows and beyond. Your knees and ankles burn, as if the bright sun above had spawned cruel children inside them. Shoulders and back tighten and grow heavy, thick, as if the skin is swelling to burst.

And always the stone resists. Its ally, gravity, mocks your struggles. The pyramid is tall... how can you haul the stone so high?

But you do. It is the only option. You haul the stone up, regardless of weight and wilfulness, and mark its holy place with a little more of your sweat and blood.

But the stone is as nothing to the pyramid. It is a speck, a mere piece, a fraction of something much larger, almost lost in the vastness of the whole. And you are being called, by word and whip, to come down. To come haul another stone. And another.

Some have fallen on the way. It is too hard, and death is easier. They fall by the wayside to lie idly in the sand, a windstrewn corpse already forming small drifts, nascent dunes. You go on. You go on to die each night, hauling stone, only to be reborn the next day as yourself, reborn to continue the endless task.

But lo, the great square blocks are no longer cut from hard stone, but rather they are crafted from cardboard. You breathe a sigh of relief. Cardboard you can carry! But what's this? These terrible blocks are not merely soft cardboard and softer air, but heavy things filled with books, terrible weighty books heavier than any sun-baked brick. Look at them all, look at all that forms the sacred pyramid: Thomas Hardy, you villain, and Stephen King. Galsworthy and Trollope! How could you? Rowling, you started so fine, and then, and then...

All must feed the pyramid. All must be hauled, each printed word a little heavier than the last. You come to hate Robert Jordan. L. Ron Hubbard is despised, at least until you find money in one of those terrible blocks of words and allow your opinion of scientology to rise upward accordingly, bribe or not. Marcel Proust you confine to the most withering reaches of Hell, genius or no. Finnegan's Wake seems more cruel by the step.

Oh, but Agatha Christie you love, that sexy old dame. Mass market paperbacks, so thin, so bearable, so close to air that you almost weep for the joy of it. Oh, the Harlequins, lined up so neat and trim, torn bodices hidden behind the shoulders of neighbors.

Such laudable writers, the harlequinites! So concerned with brevity... You become passionate about the minimalists, and with them you mock Thomas Wolfe. Look Homeward, Angel, and here's your hat. And Tom Wolfe, too, for that matter. I'll give you a different sort of bonfire for your vanity...

And yet you must admit that you were once a sinner, that once (well, twice) you wrote a first draft whose wordcount started with the number three, that most awful of all numbers (excepting, of course, four, and five... and six we will not speak of, no, let us not speak of it). But no more! No, you will never sin so surely and lengthily again. Not now, or ever.

You will write short novels, tight with pace and flowing like a newborn river from a high mountaintop, brisk and keen with glacial melt. Slender things, these will you write. Books whose spines will almost be lost on the shelf, available only to the most curious and questing of fingers.

You will write short books, light books, and take pity on the poor haulers keeling over in the dust, the poor crafters of the holy depositories (those little temples filled with sacred rows and discount prices). Pity the weak and foolish booksellers. Pity them and write short books, for such is the mercy of all good writers.